It’s taken me a while to figure out how I want to approach the topic of these new AI bots (e.g. ChatGPT) that have irrevocably changed the way writing is going to work.

Not just writing, but also the way we think and search for information. In many ways, people are already using it as a more effective form of information gathering. However, it’s also done through a lens of research as opposed to thinking. I’ll write more on that in a later post.

Back to the writing portion.

I’ve already been struggling with the future of this blog. Part of me feels I should stop and relegate my writing to a more private sphere, freeing me up from maintaining one more thing in my life.

Another part of me feels much different because writing in public has led to nothing but benefits in multiple facets of my life.

While I always had a dream of being a writer, my early ambitions were typical: write a book the whole world falls in love with and be famous. Hence, my early writing was geared towards that particular, misguided and egotistical goal. Even my early stages of blogging (prior to this site) were done with the sole purpose of ego boosting and discovery.

Then I grew up and recognized I just love the process of writing. It was then I put in a concerted effort to improve my craft for the sake of pushing my abilities as far as they could possibly go. It’s a lifelong process and I’m still working at it. Fame and monetary compensation aren’t even on the radar screen.

Now I recognize writing as a form of thinking. The act of putting my thoughts down and sifting through them has helped clarify my thoughts, improve my speaking and see my life in a bigger way.

And this is where I circle back.

The craft of writing itself has always been taught as a production art. You write to produce something: essays for school, email to coworkers, proposal to the boss, etc. In other words, writing has always been held as nothing more than a utilitarian tool.

So in that sense, AI bots make sense as the next phase in making that production more efficient. Why make a cake from scratch when cake mix will get you 80% of the way without any of the effort and sometimes, identical results?

Using AI to write text becomes nothing more than a choice on how you want to communicate things. And, I suppose if I’m being honest, it does free up a lot of wasted time dealing with low level communication.

However, the act of writing also connects with thinking. It’s a way to show your thoughts, unearth what’s going on in your head and make connections. Outside the realm of production, it has numerous benefits to our well being. Just look at the many cognitive and psychological benefits of journaling or morning pages.

At the fear of being seen as an old man lamenting the loss of better times, I want to be clear my problem has been the way we’ve approached writing. Or any art form for that matter. We never teach that art can be done for the sake of doing art without any consideration of pragmatic outcome.

Which leads us to this cultural moment.

The future of writing is going to change and at some point, we will question who actually wrote what they did… and then stop caring. We will look at people who still sit down and think through every word as something of a novelty, in the same way we are amazed at people still practicing stone carving.

Online writing has already suffered from endless, bland posts that offer nothing but algorithm optimized wording in order to clickbait, rank higher on search and generate ad revenue (or my nemesis: marketing funnels). Maybe this will finally push the standard up again as people can just generate their own response instead of feeding disingenuous websites their attention.

And since AI bots falter when it comes to the edge of human knowledge, this may even be a chance for actual experts to stand out and be a source of information.

Or we may just be compounding a current problem of information overload and flooding the world with false information. Unfortunately, we are seriously lacking critical thinking skills to help us through this problem (again, a post I’ll come to later).

Regardless of the outcome, we are now in that moment. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen next.

In the meantime, I will continue to write here. If you are getting this in your email, I have to respect that you’ve given me permission to do so in trust that I will make due on my promise to deliver Vito-generated content; doing my best each time.

While my lifelong efforts may not even come close to what some AI generator can do in seconds, it can’t give me the benefit of what a lifetime spent practicing has done.